Washington, July 27 (ANI): A new study has found that adding hormone therapy to radiation therapy may reduce overall survival in men with pre-existing heart conditions, even if they have high-risk prostate cancer.
From 1991 to 2006, 14,594 men with prostate cancer were treated with brachytherapy-based radiation therapy. Of these, 1,378 had a history of congestive heart failure or myocardial infarction.
Among these men with heart conditions, 22.6 percent received supplemental external beam radiation therapy and 42.9 percent received four months of androgen deprivation therapy to reduce testosterone in their bodies, which can help the cancer grow.
For the entire group of men with a history of heart problems, adding hormone therapy led to a significant increase in overall mortality.
For men with pre-existing heart conditions and high-risk prostate cancer, researchers found that by 5 years, 31.8 percent of the men who received hormones had died compared to 19.5 percent of the men who did not receive hormone therapy.
"We found that for men with localized prostate cancer and a history of heart problems, treatment with hormones plus radiation was associated with a higher all-cause mortality than treatment with radiation alone, even for patients with high-risk malignant disease," Paul L. Nguyen, M.D., lead author of the study and a radiation oncologist at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center in Boston, said.
The study has been just published online in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics, the official scientific journal of ASTRO. (ANI)
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